If you're looking for somewhere pleasant to spend the winter, Svalbard is not an obvious choice. Far to the north of the Norwegian mainland, not much more than 1,000km from the north pole, this little group of islands gets as cold as -20C. The wind blows hard enough to bowl you over, and, if you stray too far without a rifle, you just might end up inside a polar bear.

Above all, it's dark. The sun that sets in mid-November does not rise above the horizon until late January. Even then, most locals won't see it for another month, thanks to the mountains that surround the main settlement of Longyearbyen.

The first time I visited Svalbard, for a jazz festival in January 2008, the wind sent visions of collapsing buildings dancing through my head as I tried to sleep. I came damn near frostbite when I twisted my knee falling off a dogsled. And, on the wall of a local museum, I found this morale-sapping quote: "This place is abandoned by God and ought to have been abandoned a long time ago by mankind as well."

Halfway through the trip, however, I decided to move to this blight on Creation.

I'd been living in Alaska for more than a decade, and I reckoned I could make a living as a journalist in most places, but this move even further north raised eyebrows among my friends and loved ones. How would I cope with the isolation and endless dark, they asked. Small communities in polar regions are notorious for alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and suicide. Even in my old hometown of Juneau, where the days are merely short in winter, plenty are affected by seasonal affective disorder.

When people in the land of Sarah Palin say you're losing it, therapy merits consideration. And you won't find any shrinks among Longyearbyen's 1,800 inhabitants. The locals are mostly coal miners, academics and scientists.

I thought that the novelty of the situation might get me through that first polar night. Among its many peculiarities, Longyearbyen is known as a place where dying is forbidden, since, as the BBC put it last year, "the town's small graveyard stopped accepting newcomers 70 years ago, after it was discovered that the bodies were failing to decompose."

While researching a book about jazz in unusual spots, I'd already spent a few weeks at a stretch in places such as Iceland, where night lasts 20 hours a day, with no apparent ill effects. Still, a heaviness set in when I arrived at my new home one Sunday at the beginning of last November.

At 2pm the sky was already black and there was no one to greet me, just an empty room with its key in the door. There didn't seem to be much to do but wait until my landlord turned up. My heart sank at the thought that this might be the first of many such moments.

An hour later, however, I heard muffled voices elsewhere in the building. It turned out that my host was already on the spot, preparing for one of Svalbard's many festivals – and wondering if I'd somehow gotten lost. Such moments lift the darkness more than the first rays of dawn.

It doesn't exactly suit the image of the rugged Arctic explorer to say I spent my "initiation" sipping champagne while looking at paintings and listening to a classical ensemble. But, to my relief, Svalbard is not a place where life grinds to a halt when the sun goes down. Residents have moved rather than been born here (the average stay is six years), and they're determined to make the most of it. They will simply tell you that it gets "cosy" as the tens of thousands of spring and summer tourists who clog the few streets clear out. Those who remain don't have time to get bored.

The town celebrates the onset of night in late October with the biggest festival of the year, Dark Season Blues, and follows that a couple of weeks later with an arts festival called KunstPause. Nobody thinks much of performing outdoors or listening around fires while scarfing expertly prepared – and free – reindeer steaks in the centre of town. Like the university students who keep cycling the 3km from the dorms to campus, the dark is just another of life's many quirks.

The complete darkness of December, meanwhile, brings a barrage of lights and events, ranging from outdoor parades to craft fairs to highbrow choral ensembles. Christmas is basically a month long, complete with the annual opportunity to see trees (imported from Denmark). Anyone finding themselves in a lull afterwards can seek out the clubs offering activities as intense as rugby and as tranquil as chess. There's lots of talk about beer in the pubs that are scattered around the island, but it's a population that knows when to say "when" as well any anyone.

And you can always escape for a few days. A 90-minute flight away, Tromsø, with its annual film festival, offers the chance to bask in three hours of sun daily during January.

Back in Svalbard a couple weeks later is Polarjazz, which draws a fair number of acclaimed musicians undeterred by the occasional exploding bass guitar exposed to the cold for too long.

"We've always wanted to come to Svalbard," Solveig Heilg said when she visited last year's Polarjazz as part of the band Katzenjammer. "It's almost like landing on the moon."

Longyearbyen throws yet another bash when the sun returns, but for many that's when moods start turning dark. It isn't just Svalbard, either – recent studies indicated that depression and suicides are most common at extreme latitudes during the polar summer, essentially because people aren't getting enough sleep.

As another season of darkness sets in, therefore, we in Svalbard will be digging out not the Prozac but our party clothes.

Meanwhile, at the south pole ...

Darkness isn't a problem for the couple of thousand people who spend what Britons think of as the winter months at research stations scattered around Antarctica. Whatever time you venture out, you're guaranteed to find the sun in the sky. I spent two five-month seasons working on the ice as co-editor of the Antarctic Sun, a newsletter published by the US Antarctic Program, and at all the bases and field camps I was struck by a hyperactivity designed to squeeze out maximum productivity.

Only a tiny proportion of applicants get to join the "frozen chosen", and they go through vigorous checks to ensure they're of sound mind and body. People near the north pole tend to find constant light more irritating than constant dark, but those deployed to Antarctica had cheerfulness – feigned, if necessary – indoctrinated into their blood.

When I saw people suffering from lack of sleep, therefore, it seemed less an inability to deal with the light than the result of too many hours spent skiing or hiking the few trails we were permitted on. When contests were held for rare trips to ice caves and other sites, nobody passed up a winning opportunity, no matter how heavy their eyelids were.

Holidays were marked with parties and lavish feasts, while revellers at the larger McMurdo station saw in one new year wearing T-shirts for the annual Icestock music festival, during a "heat wave" that sent the mercury soaring to 9C. If all that wasn't enough to give you a good night's sleep, extra-heavy curtains did an admirable job of blocking out the light.